Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by John Tukey (American Statistician)

John Wilder Tukey (1915–2000) was an American mathematician and researcher who transformed statistics. He developed comprehensive theories and inventive methods to analyze complex data and compute series of numbers quickly. Tukey also coined the terms software and bit.

Born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Tukey was educated at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, and Princeton University. He founded Princeton’s statistics department in 1965 and remained on the university’s faculty throughout his career.

Tukey’s ground-breaking work for unearthing the hidden patterns and correlations in large amounts of data profoundly impacted fields as diverse as electrical engineering, operations research, financial and business risk management, and the social sciences. He introduced such statistical concepts as the Fast Fourier Transform algorithm, the box plot, the Tukey range test, the Tukey lambda distribution, the Tukey test of additivity, and the Teichmüller-Tukey lemma. From 1960–80, Tukey helped design election polls for NBC.

In a 1958 American Mathematical Monthly article, Tukey introduced the term software to describe programs on which electronic calculators ran. In 1970, while working as a researcher for AT&T’s Bell Laboratories, Tukey first used the word bit as an abbreviation for binary digit.

Tukey later served as a consultant for the Educational Testing Service, Xerox Corp., and Merck & Co. He was also a noted public commentator on social and environmental topics, attracting attention with his criticism of biologist Alfred C. Kinsey’s research on sexual behavior. Tukey also warned that aerosol spray cans damaged the ozone layer.

Tukey’s notable works are Convergence and Uniformity in Topology (1940,) Index to Statistics and Probability (1973,) and Exploratory Data Analysis (1977.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by John Tukey

I can see that you have a complex problem: it has a real and an imaginary part.
John Tukey

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